Paul Finebaum: The 'clock is ticking loudly' on John Calipari at Kentucky

Paul Finebaum believes John Calipari is feeling the pressure more than ever in Lexington.

Kentucky fell to Kansas State on Sunday, and with their loss it ensured that none of four of the biggest programs in all of the sport — Duke, North Carolina, Kansas and the aforementioned Wildcats — would make it to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. That’s unacceptable for Finebaum, who believes Kentucky is slipping into irrelevance.

“Those four programs, Kentucky has become irrelevant,” started Finebaum, via Mac and Cube in the Morning. “We get all excited about them every year, because they’ve got the No. 1 recruiting class coming in, which they do again. Last year in November, they were the No. 4 team in the country. They had to fight to get into the tournament in February, which they did. Then they laid another egg. To the elite college basketball world, getting knocked out in the Round of 32 is a failure.”

Continuing, Finebaum stated that even if you move the level of expectations from say the Final Four to the Sweet Sixteen, Calipari’s Wildcats still fell well short of their goal once again.

“I thought just by moving the goal posts, or the goal this year with Kentucky, they had to get to the Sweet Sixteen. Just to wash away the stench of the last couple of years, and what I mean by that is I mean, you had COVID, you had a losing season and then last year, losing to Saint Peter’s in Round 1. Which is one of the worst losses. It has some company now after this past couple of days, but it’s still one of the worst losses in modern college basketball history, and now this,” added Finebaum. “Beating Providence saved the day from complete disaster on Friday, but there’s no way you can look at this season as anything other than a failure. 

“There’s also no way you can look at John Calipari’s career and say nothing, the clock is ticking loudly. You can say whatever you want about his record, but it’s been 11 years since a championship. It’s been seven, eight years since a Final Four. He has, this class, I say class because there’s no such thing anymore in college basketball, but over the last four years, which normally is what we used to refer to as a class, this team, this program has one NCAA Tournament win. That’s a failure.”

It all boils down to the fact that Finebaum believes that Calipari, having the immense resources he has, is severely underachieving at Kentucky at the moment.

“It feels like a trend,” Finebaum said. “He’s shaking things up. He’s changed his approach. I thought from the first win over in Knoxville up until a couple of days ago, he had done a good job of loosening up, but what happened yesterday? The games on the line, and his team goes cold, and the other team lights it up. There’s a thousand reasons why you win an NCAA Tournament game, but there’s no getting around it.

“When you have all the resources that he has, and you have all the players that he gets, and this is the result. I mean, think about the SEC. That’s what — we have three SEC schools in the final 16, and Kentucky is not one of them.”

While Kentucky certainly slipped far below their standards at times during the 2022-2023 season, the Wildcats actually made it further than last season. Still, it’s obvious Paul Finebaum and the rest of Big Blue Nation expect more, and John Calipari will feel the flames next season if he can’t deliver.